If the yeast are growing faster, won't the dough be ready sooner? Maybe bacteria growth isn't suppressed, but I can see it being limited. So in a way we can manipulate the balance. If so, would this also work with any SD starter or just certain yeast cultures like David is using?

I don't know. I think your observation is very interesting. It seemes reasonable to me that the bacteria are still there doing their thing - but maybe it's just a different thing than they do under ordinary culture/dough conditions where there is less oxygen. Even if they are eating the same food supply, are you letting the food supply get to near zero? If not, would the bacteria not still be doing their thing? The yeast may be eating more, but there is still food for the bugs. Helping the yeast only hurts the bacteria if what you're doing to help the yeast also hurts the bacteria (e.g. takes their food, oxygen bad for them, some yeast byproduct hurts them, etc.) Its not intuitive to me how that would be the case here. Just because the yeast are growing faster doesn't automatically mean the bacteria are suppressed, I don't think. I stand to be corrected.

It seems rather different than beer making. As you noted, beer making starts with sanitation. You culture probably starts with bacteria outnumbering your yeast by two or three orders of magnitude.

CL

Not really sure. But I ended up losing the culture. It turned into a sourdough. I've no doubt a very good sourdough, but a sourdough nonetheless.

Wasn't what I was looking for.

What happened was I tried to feed it too aggressively again. I took about a 275 gram sample of mother dough and fed it about 0.75 kilograms of flour. Too much, but I was impatient to do a third test firing.

I'll have to try and find some more barm when I can, Chau. Shouldn't be long I'm thinking.

In the meantime I have another interesting culture that smells of cheese. I think it'll make some of the best tasting bread yet, but I just hope it'll be a little easier to work with. Less temperamental.

Thanks David. Your technique is very interesting especially with the late addition of the bacteria into the mix. How much culture did you add to the dough in your estimate (% wise)? How long did you ferment before you added the bacteria into the mix and how many total hours did you ferment the dough before baking? all room temp fermentation?

Marlon

I know I said I'd edit the other post but I think if I do that you'll miss it.

Its important to remember with me, that, what I do depends on what my leavening agent is. If I have some sort of weird culture, I'll try and go a fermentation route that I feel might coax as much flavor out as possible without impacting the gluten structure. I try and go right to the edge of the cliff and then stop.

With this particular barm culture, this is the second time I've ever worked with it. The first time I worked with it I treated it like any other culture; I added a small amount to a 2.2 pound bag of flour and did a room temperature bulk rise. That resulted in a pure sourdough. So I came up with incremental additions as a strategy to keep that from happening in the future. It worked well.

Initially I was using a preferment. And to make that preferment I started with a tiny amount of barm that I feed a small amount of flour. Just before the yeast finished eating I would add more flour, doubling the amount of preferment at each iteration. Once I had enough preferment to ferment an entire 2.2 pound bag of flour, I stiffened the preferment by adding flour without adding water. I put this dough ball in the refrigerator. After some period of time, during which the dough ball turned a light brown hue, I added the rest of the flour and water in order to form the final dough ball. This dough ball was allowed to bulk rise in the fridge until I got ready to scale and ball.

So as far as ratios, I was roughly doubling each time. On the last step I added more than double the amount of flour because I knew that by doing that I was giving bacteria their opportunity to come in. The number of total hours? I don't know. The whole process ran over the course of a few days though, so there was some effort involved. But when you smell rinsed barm, you know that there is no sweeter smell on Earth and you do as much as you can to try and preserve that.

There are some key modifications you need to make but it's certainly more than possible. Posters here have already shown thermocouple isolation, which is one of those things that needs to be done. Simply moving the thermocouple works well enough.

I have a standard 550 degree oven.

The first thing I noticed when examining the inside of the oven is that it's black. This may not be ideal. Although black colored objects typically have a high emissivity, they also have high absorption. The entire oven interior, including the surface area behind the heating elements, is black. Because the surface area behind the heating elements is black, that surface is probably going to do a fair job of absorbing radiation and dissipating that energy in the form of radiation, conduction and convection through to the outside of the oven. This is not ideal.

Ideally you want the heating element to have a view factor of 1 with respect to the pizza, or the pizza stone. Because the heating elements are round, the view factor is already significantly less. To increase the effective view factor I mounted a very thin polished aluminum piece directly above the coils with a clearance of about 1 inch. This will serve as a more effective reflecting surface so that the part of the radiation that would have been transmitted through and lost due to the black surface is now reflected back towards the stone. Because of aluminum's other characteristics we don't need to worry about it melting unless it touches the heating elements directly.

The next thing I noticed was the size of the compartment I was trying to heat. It had to be reduced, leaving a relatively small compartment size that could be more effectively and efficiently heated. Here aluminum foil works fine. So fine in fact that while the top portion of the entire oven compartment is very hot, the bottom portion remains cool to the touch.

These minor modifications result in an oven that hits appropriate temperatures in about 15 minutes and can deliver enough BTU's to the stone surface to leapord a 12 inch pie finished in 40 seconds flat. Perfect. Just enough time to tear the basil and mozzarella.

I'll fool with the pictures tomorrow.

This sounds very interesting. I place my stone on the very top rack of my oven, it's 2.5 inches from the electric heat element. Do you think this is too far? Also the thermocouple is directly behind the heating element, do you simply remove the couple from its holder and place it lower in the oven? I'm at about a 4 minute bake time, but If I could get down to a minute I think I might really have something!

Yes. Just detach it and pull it down. When you get finished simply place it back up.

2.5 inches of clearance is fine. But you will not get a 60 second bake without a reflective shield behind the heating elements. Moving the thermocouple by itself will get you down to about 3 minutes give or take, which is in the Varasano range and makes great pizza. Some might say better.

Since my last batch of dough turned into a sourdough by accident, I prepared a new batch using KAAP. The protein content of the flour was cut to between 9% and 10% using White Lily flour. ADY was the leavening agent. To make up for the reduced protein content, I increased the oven temperature accordingly. To prevent the bottom from burning, I mopped the stone using water until the stone temperature was around 850 to 875 at launch.

40 second bake (including the time it took to remove and turn the pizza).

Pie accidentally folded some when I was preparing it for photos. Sloshed away some of the contrast in the middle. Sucks.

I was wondering if you had any theories on the micro leoparding you achieve. Most of the leoparding I get is large in nature - yours is closer to Da Michele. I know leoparding is tied to fermentation, but I have not connected the dots fully.

I was wondering if you had any theories on the micro leoparding you achieve. Most of the leoparding I get is large in nature - yours is closer to Da Michele. I know leoparding is tied to fermentation, but I have not connected the dots fully.

John

In my experience leoparding has to do with two things. The first is the degree of fermentation, as you have stated. The second is the intensity of the heat you're applying. If all other variables are set equal, the more intense the heat applied, the more tiny the leopard spots eventually become.

On the other hand, since the protein content of this flour blend is a little bit lower, it takes a greater degree of effort to leopard the pie at all to begin with. Too low and I'll end up with even browning. Tomorrow I'll show you a 4th attempt made with this blend of flour where the heat was slightly lower. You'll note the effect that had on the appearance of the crust.

One of the things I notice about Da Michele is the intense heat of their ovens. In fact, I'm not sure it wouldn't be better to call their baking thing a furnace. I do not, however, know anything about their flour. Do you know anything about Da Michele's flour?

This one below was baked from the same batch of blended KAAP and White Lily as the last. This was later on during the same day. But it was baked at a slightly lower temperature, which resulted in broader leopard features. This bake was around 50-55 seconds.

What I notice about the crumb is that the longer the pie bakes at a given temperature, the less dense the crumb becomes. Pies that are baked in the 30-40 second range have a more tight celled structure.

(To be extra clear, I haven't yet said anything about the relative softness of the different crumb structures. Just the appearance).